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Forum:Literary Criticism
We have talked about this for a while and Adam's attempt to do so within the Jefferson Pinkard article seems to me to bring it to a head. I believe we need to decide just how we want to do this since Adam, for one, is interested in contributing such articles and I believe we all agree they would be useful. It seems to me that articles such as "Literary Criticism of Southern Victory" would be too unwieldy unless they are a general commentary on the series. My thought would be to use that as a prefix to an existing article such as "Literary Criticism on Jefferson Pinkard" for what Adam had done earlier. We could also title them "Compare and Contrast Jake Featherston and Adolph Hitler" for a detailed analysis as an example. These would be categorized by work and those would be sub-cats of "Literary Criticism". Thoughts? ML4E 20:01, May 9, 2010 (UTC) :The format for titling can be fine-tuned as we go and the categorization sounds good. I'd still be concerned about subjectivity. There's certainly room for it in a literary criticism article, but it needs to be set off as such. We're party here to some inside information of which the casual reader may not be aware: the fact that he got the idea to write MwIH while working on the end of IatD and being intrigued by the possibility of Werewolves with teeth. The Wiki is fairly crawling with author insights like that, and something like Adam's bit about Pinkard being written the way he was to show Turtledove's belief in the subtlety of our worst selves could easily be mistaken as more of the same if we don't find a way to mark it off as such. Turtle Fan 21:40, May 9, 2010 (UTC) ::I do agree that there is a place for criticism here. I think the biggest problem we've had with adding criticism is that for too many people, literary review never gets more thoughtful than "Daniel MacArthur is obviously an ATL version of Douglas MacArthur." So we've probably overdone it on clamping down. But I've been very hip to seeing someone do a thoughtful, well written comparison between Hitler and Featherston for some time now. And, to use another recent example, it may be helpful to have some part of an article address things like the fact that the GW in Europe follows OTL until about 1915 or so. ::The paragraph on Pinkard problematic for the reasons TF has stated: it's just too subjective. Yes, Pinkard starts out not terribly bad and gets worse. But it's quite a leap from that to the idea that Pinkard is a philosophical statement by HT that no one is born evil. I'd cite "Joe Steele" as a counter-example, which arguably shows HT believes people are indeed born evil (or that he's willing to by off on the idea long enough to make a story work). Formalist criticism has it's place, but I'd certainly want external sources before we just guess at HT's intent, no matter how educated a guess it is. So even in a relaxed regime, I'd be opposed to putting it up in its present form. TR 00:50, May 10, 2010 (UTC) :::I see what you mean. I always thought of Pinkard as an example of "banality of evil". There should be a way of indicating something as coming from HT and that something is the opinion of the poster. ML4E 02:47, May 10, 2010 (UTC) ::::Since this is a Wiki, "the opinion of the poster" could quickly lose its meaning. There are many of us, after all. My "opinion of the poster" section might look very different from yours. (With Pinkard, I just assume that HT started out with no particular plans for him at all and, as he figured out where the series was headed in the later books, had to scramble to find someone conveniently situated to be pushed toward filling a certain role. Like Featherston himself. And while I wouldn't have picked him out as a genocidaire in the GW books, he was still a pretty uncritical member of a very noxious society, so at best it was just a gradual increase in wrong-headed attitudes that were there from the start.) We could laber sections as "Turtle Fan's Section," "ML4E's Section," "TR's Section," "Adam Keller's Section," et cetera, but that would just be dumb. We could all agree on a certain threshold of support from registered members past which a given paragraph can carry the stamp of approval of the wiki's writers. That would, if anything, be even more cumbersome, and anon users would ignore it, in the course of legitimate edits. I think a certain cap on the acceptable degree of subjectivity is the only really pracitcable solution. Maybe, if you want to delve deeply into a highly subjective interpretation, you'll be obliged to include alternate interpretations alongside it and try to give them equal weight. That might be enlightening to the holder of the opinion as well. Turtle Fan 03:27, May 10, 2010 (UTC) ::::: As a matter of fact, when I read the Great War part, not knowing where things were headed later, Pinkard was one of my favorite characters - only, I definitely felt he was a bit "too good to be true". Turtledove often lets characters, even symapthetic ones, display a bit of racism or prejudice (in "Ruled Britania" he lets Shakespeare make a nasty remark about the Irish). Never so with the early Pinkard. Never. Not a racist act, not a racist word, not even a fleeting racist thought in the privacy of his own mind. Not once in the whole three volumes of the Great War. The Confederacy has instutionalised racist discrimination built deeply into its laws and society, racism is completley politically correct, President Woodrow Wilson who considers himself a refined cultured man makes a speech in which he takes pride in the Confederacy being a place where every white man is equal to every other white man - but a foundry worker in Birmingham, Alabama never, in the course of three years of war (and black uprising) lets a racist throght go through his head. There is the situation that white workers in the Sloss Foundry are taken into the army and blacks hired in their place. It would be the most natural thing in the world for Pinkard to think: "Wait a minute, they are taking white men's jobs! When my mates come back from the war, will they get their jobs back? If I am taken to the war, will I get my job back?" Many workers in less insitutionally racist societies have been known to say nasty things - and take nasty acts - in this kind of situation. Not Pinkard. Not for one moment. He just welcomes the incoming black fellow workers with no reservations, judging them only and solely by professional performance. (In "How Few Remain" we see white miners in the US West make nasty racist remarks when Lincoln refers to the blacks - but Pinkard down in Alabama is completley immune to any such nasty impulses, even when he has concrete reasons to feel that his job might be threatened?) And then, exactly this virtuous character turns out to be destined to become a monstrous genocidal mass murderer of blacks, the worst and most terrible monster imgainable. Just a coincidence, becuse Turtledove needed somebody for this role and Pinkard just happned to be handy? Perhaps, but to my mind not very likely. More likely is that Pinkard was destined in advnce to fall down morally very steeply indeed, from a great height to a very very low depth. Anyway, this is my opinion - which can of course be disputed - and I do think that there should be a place in this Wiki where such things should be discussed. Adam Keller 12:01, May 10, 2010 (UTC) ::::::There will be, but we first need to find a way to make it clear when we're opining. I never once saw Pinkard as a paragon of virtue. Actually I really just found him boring, and spent most of his scenes hoping the next POV would be a stronger one. And remember that the US was supposed to lose GWI when Turtledove set out. That's why Flora started out as Rosa Luxembourg and was quietly rewritten as Hillary Clinton in the AE books. That's why Morrell was named after Erwin Rommel. So it was to be the US in which revanchism, militarism, and authoritarianism arose. Not sure where the CS was headed originally. Maybe the black uprising was going to touch off a long, intractable guerrilla conflict and the latent racism of the CS would have evolved into population reduction anyway. I guess Pinkard could have been headed for that, but now we're even farther into the realm of the speculative. Anyway, I always felt HT was making him up as he went along. Turtle Fan 19:15, May 10, 2010 (UTC) :::::::I don't think that Turtledove intended to depict a war between two nasty Fascist-type countries. With whom would you identify? Who would go to a football match if he hated both teams and wanted both of them to lose? (Unless the focus would have been on revolutionaries on both sides trying to bring down both regimes - not impossible if Flora was to be Rosa Luxembourg). More likely, in case of "a US in which revanchism, militarism, and authoritarianism arose" that south of the border the black veterans of the Confederate Army who were given the francise would have led the way to a full emancipation of all blacks. Some episodes in the later parts of the Great War series seemed to point this way, and are a complete dead-end as the series turned out. In that case, probably Reginald Bartlett would have had a major role to play rather than be just killed off (I very much mourned him). Pehrhaps Bartlett rather than Featherston would have become the CS President, and united whites and blacks in opposing the nasty yankees? (Pure speculation which came into my mind just this second). But anyway about Pinkard - he may have seemed boring to you just becuase he was (until 1917) really a nice decent guy with no visible faults - that can be very boring! And as I said, to be completely devoid of racism in such a throughly racist society does make a person into "a paragon of virtue". And about "finding a way to make it clear when we're opining", I think there is nothing wrong about having a page where anybody could just openly say "my opnion about x is y" and sigh. Adam Keller 20:03, May 10, 2010 (UTC) ::::::::Racism was the Confederacy's greatest sin, but hardly its only. There would have remained the matters of the fundamental illegitimacy of their government, the support for the morally bankrupt Mexican Hapsburgs, imperialism against Haiti, a very weak commitment to religious freedom, civil liberties that couldn't hold a candle even to the anemic body of law which had managed to take hold in the US despite Remembrance, despicably restrictive immigration policies, and allowing European colonizers to return to the western hemisphere, a problem closely related to the second. Racial integration alone wouldn't have rehabilitated them. I don't see how HT could have kept them from being noxious and perhaps the fact that he couldn't either was what led him to redraw the plans for the series. ::::::::Anyway, I suggest we table this discussion for the moment and get the forum back to its original purpose. A page where anyone is free to opine . . . Well last week someone whose name escapes me started a blog post (apparently you can do that on here, though I've got no idea how) and discussion of the sort you call for flourished for a little while. Putting such a free-for-all into an actual article, no matter how clearly marked, would be unprofessional. A critical article will reflect the opinions of the writer(s), but will need to be held to a certain standard of objectivity to make it accessible and worthwhile for other readers. I think most people who do not regularly contribute to this Wiki would have little if any interest in entirely subjective opinions merely because they belong to people who happen to have made a mark here. Turtle Fan 23:09, May 10, 2010 (UTC) My, things got busy while I didn't check in. I agree that this is a wiki and not a discussion board so a to-ing and fro-ing wouldn't be appropriate. We could denote items HT has stated with a sub-heading of "Author's Comments" while opinion pieces could be denoted by "Possible Interpretations". However, the latter would have to be open to multiple interpretations. Those could be determined in the "Talk" pages or perhaps we could get the blog posts working. ML4E 21:12, May 11, 2010 (UTC) :I think the blog posts are the way to go. They're a little more versatile than the talk pages. A forum works the same way as a talk page and look how off-course this one has blown. Turtle Fan 21:54, May 11, 2010 (UTC) ::Blog button can be found on the Userpage. TR 22:03, May 11, 2010 (UTC) Bumping this Forum too. ML4E (talk) 16:45, July 11, 2015 (UTC) :I wonder what ever happened to Adam Keller. Turtle Fan (talk) 18:52, July 11, 2015 (UTC) ::I'm pretty sure he became Blaise the Purple Dragon, then anonymous user 79.something-something. :::You mean Jacob Chelsey? Then he's still with us? Turtle Fan (talk) 23:37, July 11, 2015 (UTC) ::::No, Jacob is 75.something-something. I can't prove the anonymous 79.something is Keller, but there are certain stylistic traits. For that matter, I can't prove Blaise is Keller, either. But all three share certain stylistic quirks, and coincidence seems unlikely. TR (talk) 00:03, July 12, 2015 (UTC) ::This is some hellacious topic drift, btw. TR (talk) 19:36, July 11, 2015 (UTC) :::Yeah. Pretty much killed any chance of reaching a decision on the question at hand. Turtle Fan (talk) 23:37, July 11, 2015 (UTC)